The Stasi's inconspicuous halls of terror: in pictures

The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, was founded in 1950 to flush out enemies of the state. Anyone who fell under even vague suspicion could expect to have their phones tapped and their apartments bugged. Fear-tactics were the order of the day: imprisoning, intimidating, preventing promotion at work, or entry to university.

Just before reunification in 1990, there were about six million people – near a third of the country’s total population – under surveillance. The organisation counted some 274,000 employees on its books, aided and abetted by an estimated 500,000 unpaid informants. Today the shelves on which the Stasi files are housed add up to 50 miles in length.

Berlin-based photographer Thomas Meyer, 48, has visited locations connected to Stasti activity, including the former ministry headquarters in Berlin, the bunker near Leipzig, its prison and the agency now responsible for administering and reviewing the fille archives. He hopes his austere photographs capture something of the "absurdity and outlandishness" that characterised Stasi surveillance.

The series is showing as part of an exhibition devoted to 25 years of the Ostkreuz photo agency, of which Meyer is a member. From November 13-29 2015, Goethe Institute, Passage du Désir, Paris.

Above: Prison courtroom, Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, a museum in the former East German prison and interrogation site, and a memorial to political prisoners.